radford@calgary.UUCP (Radford Neal) (03/02/85)
> > Get rid of consumer protection? How silly. Why not get rid of protection > > against murder and theft as well? There's no ethical difference between > > poking a gun in someone's ribs and taking their money, and deceiving them > > about the nature of their own actions for personal profit. > > Wrong... The point is that consumer protection can be done by private > industry, whereas law enforcement can't. (Or at least I think so.) All > you need to do to protect people against bad products it to test a lot > of products and put out a newsletter describing your findings.... Speaking as someone who calls himself a libertarian, I think this response is neither correct nor in accordance with general libertarian views (of course, I didn't see the original item; maybe the poster is well aware of the later). Selling products which are falsely represented is a crime known as fraud. I see it as ethically equivalent to theft, in that the buyer transfers ownership of wealth to the seller *conditionally* on the seller delivering the advertised product. This suffices to at least get your money back; and if the product has caused you harm I think one can also justify further damages. In a minimal government libertarian state (I'll ignore the question of whether you need a state at all...), the police would enforce this law just as they enforce laws against murder, etc. I.e. they would investigate and lay charges when people laid a complaint against someone. The police *wouldn't* go around testing products, etc., just as they don't go around excavating random ditches looking for bodies of murder victims or examining psychological profiles of citizens to see which are likely to commit murder. There is a role for private product evaluations, especially in the hazier realms of reliability, relative functionality, etc. where there is no fraud (necessarily) but rather different engineering tradeoffs. There has to be a law-enforcement basis however, else how do you deal with, say, a company which fakes demonstrations for the product evaluation people, or knowingly delivers products with hazardous defects which are unlikely to be revealed by a short evaluation? Radford Neal The University of Calgary